The World of Perfect Pitch

The topic I investigated is the difference between music by musicians with perfect pitch (PP) vs relative pitch (RP). In a lot of musical scenes, perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) is adored like it is some kind of godsend. On one hand, perfect pitch only means you can identify pitches quickly, which would not necessarily make you a better musician. On the other hand, using it as a tool to learn music theory faster and easily identifying pitches when playing in some kind of ensemble could really make someone a better (subjectively, of course) musician. Listening to music is not the same as playing music and identifying music is not the same either. It is important to note that I use the word relative pitch here as any non-absolute pitch hearing, since everyone seems to have some kind of natural understanding of relative pitches (even the untrained ear can usually distinguish the octave from the minor second for example). This is not necessarily the general use of the term relative pitch, but it is a way for me not to have to distinguish between all identified types of non-perfect pitch hearing.

It’s not hard to identify that my natural comparison groups consists of artists (PP artists vs RP artists). However, unbiased sampling of these artists is not a simple ordeal. Just choosing some random PP and RP artists would easily fall to biases, so I have put some thought and consideration into sampling the artists. Keeping differences that are due to genre out of the comparison was one of the biggest challenges for researching this corpus. For this reason, I have decided to compare specific artists with PP to artists with RP who fall into the same genre of music at approximately the same time period and with a similar caliber. In the table next to this text, you can find which PP artist I paired up with which RP artist. I used the “This is” playlists on spotify to sample tracks for each artist, and randomly deleted the difference between the number of songs for the PP and RP artists, to make sure the genre proportions were the same for each playlist as well as the sample size. I will not be able to provide a thorough conclusion due to limits in resources, but it will hopefully provide some insight into the differences between musicians with PP and those without.

I will also do some more in-depth analyses of specific tracks. I will particularly look at tracks from Jimi Hendrix and Jacob Collier, both artists that are considered to be one of a kind musical geniuses that have/had PP.

Playlists and their artists

n = 196 N = 392

About me

I’ll add text later. This is randomly generated post-modernism. “Class is fundamentally responsible for hierarchy,” says Sartre; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much class that is fundamentally responsible for hierarchy, but rather the absurdity of class. The main theme of Reicher’s[2] critique of the semiotic paradigm of discourse is the role of the observer as reader.

The primary theme of the works of Pynchon is not, in fact, narrative, but prenarrative. However, Sontag’s essay on Lyotardist narrative implies that academe is capable of significance. Cameron[3] suggests that we have to choose between Lacanist obscurity and patriarchialist neodialectic theory.

In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the concept of textual consciousness. It could be said that Lacan uses the term ‘subsemantic discourse’ to denote the stasis, and eventually the defining characteristic, of capitalist language. Bataille promotes the use of predialectic desublimation to read sexual identity.